Nevermind the NIMBYs, dust from construction represents transit progress at last

In these dog days of summer, when news slows to a trickle, we learn of yet another complaint from Weston residents about the rail corridor near or next to which they chose to live: Dust, lots of it, from tunnel-digging related to Metrolinx’s corridor-expansion project. “It’s killing us,” one local resident told the Toronto Star of the dust and the construction traffic. She didn’t mean literally, but in the sense that “we can’t have people sitting on our front porch.”

As complaints from Weston residents go, I have much more time for the dust than I do for the fact that Metrolinx is cutting down some trees, that some people don’t like or even want the noise fences Metrolinx has proposed to erect, that the airport train doesn’t stop eight times between Union Station and Pearson, that the line tragically slices their community in half, that diesel fumes will emanate from the tracks near or next to which they chose to live.

The Grand Trunk Railway opened these tracks 160 years ago, before any of these people’s houses even existed. And the tunnel in question only exists because Weston demanded it and Metrolinx agreed to build it. The rigmarole and bending-over-backwards the city and province have been through trying to placate these fearsome NIMBYs doesn’t bode well for much-needed future developments that have no existing footprint — and is all too typical of our dysfunctional transit politics.

The good news is, big things are finally happening. The corridor expansion means all-day return GO service on the Kitchener line. That’s huge. The airport train will run on diesel, be expensive and not all that quick, and only serve one of the two terminals directly — but it’s now reasonable to assume that in two short years, Toronto will finally join leading metropolises like Baltimore, Cleveland and St. Louis in offering steel-wheeled travel from the airport to downtown.

In the future that service can be electrified or converted to subway or GO; we can add more stops; we can do whatever needs doing. Just getting the base infrastructure in place is a massive step, and the dust in Weston, as bothersome as it is, represents progress. So too will the noise and traffic gridlock — and dust, no doubt — that Eglinton Avenue will endure once LRT construction gets underway in earnest. (That’s optimistically assuming the next city council doesn’t tear up the plan again, at which point Metrolinx will presumably ask meekly for “clarity.”)

These projects will be enormous gains for the city. But that’s where the optimism has to end, I’m afraid. Metrolinx has downed tools on the Scarborough LRT, because 28 city councillors, Premier Kathleen Wynne and Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak believe (in the latter’s words) that “world-class cities build underground.” Almost no-one is willing to make the case that world-class cities also build above ground where it makes sense — Paris, London, Berlin, Amsterdam, all over the place — and that Sheppard and Finch Avenues, and especially the dedicated right of way in Scarborough, are places where it makes sense. As ever, almost no-one is willing to commit to a plan if it isn’t perfect, which no plan is. And too few are willing to admit, even now, that transit costs billions that will have to come out of citizens’ pockets.

Metrolinx rolls over when ordered. Ms. Wynne and TTC Chair Karen Stintz hobbled their claims to reason by cynically backing the Scarborough subway. The Liberals still have their plan to raise billions in taxes for infrastructure investment — which is great, but the Scarborough debacle offers little hope of efficient, evidence-based execution. And the Liberals ought to be shown the door in the next election anyway, which would leave us with all the same dysfunction, all the same dreams and not a dime to pay for them. At least we would feel at home.